Media & Society Lecture 5 PDF

Media &Society Lecture 5 Audience and effects  Concepts of audiences The term ‘audience’ is problematic. There are assumptions made about it which do not stand up to examination. For example, the idea of audience as a collection of people experiencing a perfor...

Media &Society Lecture 5 Audience and effects  Concepts of audiences The term ‘audience’ is problematic. There are assumptions made about it which do not stand up to examination. For example, the idea of audience as a collection of people experiencing a performance may be true for live theatre, but is not true for magazine readers. There is not even a collection of people in one place at one time. The idea of mass audience is hardly valid, only on a relative scale of numbers.  Concepts of audiences The significance of any audience may lie in its composition as much as in its numbers. The scale may run from tens of thousands to millions. In the past 50 years the number of media and the range of media texts has increased immeasurably. This has not just expanded the numbers of the audience, but has also fragmented it.. We should not ignore the 15 million or so viewers for peaktime popular TV programmes, but we should also understand that one has moved from the dominance of broadcasting to more narrowcasting.  what new technologies have done to expanding the range of media. The very idea of audience in relation to the Internet or to multi- functional mobile phones is problematic, though not totally invalid. Just as film is no longer all about movie theatres, so music is no longer all about sales of discs. Just as film is no longer dominated by a mass audience attending by the week, so music is no longer about a few dominant genres and mass purchase in specialist stores. This further undermines the notion of audience as a coherent term. Now there are both large and small audiences, general and specialized audiences  The more closely one examines the characteristics of those who watch a programme or who read a newspaper, the more differentiated the audience members become. This increasing differentiation also increases the variables in any assessment of effects and influence. The more variables, the less easy it is to say that a given text is likely to affect its audience in a distinctive manner.  The commodified audience Audiences are defined as commodities by the media because those industries want to objectify their natures and their existence. They want to quantify the idea of audience. The audience may be fragmented into categories by interest, e.g. for video – sport, ‘keep fit’, drama, porn. The media industries have a vested interest in validating the idea of audience as a meaningful and coherent term.. If they can’t define their audiences in terms which validate investment by backers and expenditure by advertisers, then they don’t have a business  Audiences are defined and delivered in terms of number – reader figures, circulation figures, box-office figures, viewing figures and so on. These numbers are worth money. Quantity analysis may be refined by such factors as region of sale or time of viewing. It may be further defined as in the case of television where television ratings (TVRs) measure the numbers of the target audience for the programme  For the media producer, audiences may be defined as ‘audience profile’, which is in turn defined by features such as age, gender and disposable income. What matters is the producers’ ability to target the audience and its purchasing power. Audiences may also be defined in terms of the product type which they prefer, which in turn relates to their interests. This is why marketing devices such as The National Households Survey are used, to try and define such interests.  broadcast channels seek to identify and attract their ‘type’ of audience. The more specific the material broadcast, the more specific the audience identity is – from Discovery Channel to local radio.  The active audience This is the audience conceived in terms of how it deals with the media. This is about taking a perspective which starts from the view of the audience, not the view of the institution. It is about how the audience engages with the text. The notion of activity draws attention to the part of the audience in making choices.  The active audience The activity referred to is both about the intellectual work of the audience and about kinds of physical reaction around the text. For example, in terms of context, audiences do not passively engage with media. They use radio as an adjunct to activities such as driving a car or household work. It has been shown that audiences engage in all sorts of activities while ‘watching’ television – from playing a musical instrument, to forms of housework. Newspapers and magazines may encourage active engagement with quizzes or crosswords, which have nothing to do with news or reading articles.  It is also true to say that audiences can be active in making choices (channel hopping) and in using technology The notion of activity draws attention to the part of the audience in making choices  Uses and gratifications One fairly traditional perspective on the audience as a user of text (which also is part of the effects debate) is described as the uses and gratifications approach. In this case it has been assumed that people are motivated by kinds of ‘need’ in their engagement with the text, as with their engagement with others in social interactions. I will summarize these as  I will summarize these as informational needs; personal needs such as maintenance of identity; social needs, not least for forms of interaction; entertainment needs, including the need for kinds of diversion The audience is actively selecting aspects of the text for its own use: it is using that material actively to work through interests and concerns  The reading audience This is the audience in a state of engagement with the text. This conception of audience is about it being engaged in an activity. But audiences as readers are not necessarily understood to be entirely in control of the process of the production of meaning. one approach used by Morley (1989) (drawing from Hall and before that from Parkin’s ideas about three ‘meaning systems’) describes the audience in terms of three different relationships with the text.  The preferred reading is about that meaning which is preferred by the producer, inscribed in the text, and likely to be taken from the text by the reader because the use of various conventions and devices close down other ways of understanding it. The alternative reading is one that produces meanings which were not intended by the producer but which do not seriously challenge the dominant meaning. The oppositional reading is one which does so challenge that dominance, and implies a degree of intellectual autonomy in the reader. This kind of analysis also tends to deal in ideology, so that dominant meanings are also about the dominant ideology.  The question remains, to what extent is the audience free to resist preferred readings? The answer seems to have a lot to do with the cultural background of the audience member, and with their particular beliefs, attitudes and values within that cultural nexus. Liebes and Katz (1993) have demonstrated that a text may be understood in different ways by those coming to it with different sets of values and priorities. Silverstone (1994) comments on their work: ‘results suggested that cultural and ethnic identity do provide a significant determinant of different relationships to the texts,  Critical views still tend to fall into the model of audience as either victim or as hero. What we need to remember is that, if texts cannot be neutral – and some may be less neutral than others – so too audiences as readers bring their own experiential and ideological baggage to that process of reading. In saying this, I am not suggesting that there is some kind of absolutely truthful reading out there of the film or magazine. But I am drawing attention to the fact that readers may be ‘influenced’ by factors other than devices in the text, or their experience of the media in general  The variability of audience experience and attitudes has been used in what Curran (1996) has called ‘New Revisionism’, which argues that the media do not influence the audience in any consistent or meaningful way. He cites research by Meyer (1976) as typifying findings about the variability of response to the media: ‘different types of children, bringing different beliefs, attitudes and values to the viewing of the show as a result of different socialisation processes, are affected in different ways’. Such evidence has been used to talk down media influence and to talk up the importance of the text and of the ‘audience as reader’ (not as victim).